BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Jul 11, 2023
Introduction Research into current robot middleware has revealed that most of them are either too... more Introduction Research into current robot middleware has revealed that most of them are either too complicated or outdated. These facts have motivated the development of a new middleware to meet the requirements of usability by non-experts. The proposed middleware is based on Android and is intended to be placed over existing robot SDKs and middleware. It runs on the android tablet of the Cruzr robot. Various toolings have been developed, such as a web component to control the robot via a webinterface, which facilitates its use. The middleware was developed using Android Java and runs on the Cruzr tablet as an app. It features a WebSocket server that interfaces with the robot and allows control via Python or other WebSocket-compatible languages. The speech interface utilizes Google Cloud Voice text-to-speech and speech-to-text services. The interface was implemented in Python, allowing for easy integration with existing robotics development workflows, and a web interface was developed for direct control of the robot via the web. The new robot middleware was created and deployed on a Cruzr robot, relying on the WebSocket API and featuring a Python implementation. It supports various robot functions, such as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, navigation, displaying content and scanning bar codes. The system's architecture allows for porting the interface to other robots and platforms, showcasing its adaptability. It has been demonstrated that the middleware can be run on a Pepper robot, although not all functions have been implemented yet. The middleware was utilized to implement healthcare use cases and received good feedback. Cloud and local speech services were discussed in regard to the middleware's needs, to run without having to change any code on other robots. An outlook on how the programming interface can further be simplified by using natural text to code generators has been/is given. For other researchers using the aforementioned platforms (Cruzr, Pepper), the new middleware can be utilized for testing human-robot interaction. It can be used in a teaching setting, as well as be adapted to other robots using the same interface and philosophy regarding simple methods.
Background: Currently, it is hard for non-robotics-experts to create healthcare use cases for rob... more Background: Currently, it is hard for non-robotics-experts to create healthcare use cases for robots. To improve this situation, we want to implement our own middleware. This middleware should hide the technical details from our students. With this it will be possible to create social robotic use cases without robotics domain knowledge. The new middleware should cover the existing requirements of being usable by non-experts. Existing robot middleware were researched, and we found that most are too complicated or outdated. This is the reason a new middleware was developed. We developed our new middleware based on Android. The middleware can be put over existing robot SDKs and middleware. It runs on the android tablet of the Cruzr robot. Some tooling for the middleware was developed as well, e.g. a web component to control the robot via a webinterface.Results: We created the new robot middleware and deployed it on a Cruzr robot. The middleware relies on the WebSocket API and includes ...
Although robots have been used for quite some time in education on school and university level, w... more Although robots have been used for quite some time in education on school and university level, we found no reports of robots being used in the teaching of medical informatics. Thus we present the timetable and structure of a one week, 2 ECTS blocked course for robots in medical informatics initiated in autumn 2022. 19 participants completed the first iteration. We report about the requirements in terms of an appropriate programming environment, the combination among robots and our medical informatics lab and the results of the student’s evaluation of the first instance as well as the experiences with the two types of robots used.
In this paper we present first findings of the Digi-Care project, a multidisciplinary, multi-stak... more In this paper we present first findings of the Digi-Care project, a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder research project investigating the impacts of digitization on nursing work practices and in particular the transmission of patient care information within and beyond nursing work practices. We completed the initial data collection of the funded 3-year research project and report on a plethora of significant and critical IT-related events. Some of them can be attributed to usability issues.
Clinical pathways are often promoted as the holy grail of efficient healthcare provision. However... more Clinical pathways are often promoted as the holy grail of efficient healthcare provision. However, our experiences during the Swiss research project Hospital of the Future demonstrated that most Swiss hospitals do not implement clinical pathways in the sense of '… a document describing the common process of a multidisciplinary treatment for a particular type of patient'. In this paper, we will discuss reasons for the lack of pathway implementations. We differentiate between three different categories of explanations: (i) organization-specific impediments, (ii) environmental hurdles, and (iii) inherent problems of clinical pathways. Without additional support and regulation by the policy maker, it seems rather unlikely that an increase of pathway implementations will take place in the near-future in Switzerland.
We analyzed the admission workflow in three Swiss hospitals of different size for normal and emer... more We analyzed the admission workflow in three Swiss hospitals of different size for normal and emergency admissions. Our goal was to detect shortcomings mainly in the administrative admission process due to media breaks. We obtained 9 different workflows (three per hospital) and a total of 22 shortcomings in the admission process which were present or likely in two or more of the hospitals. A considerable number could be traced back to missing information requiring time consuming extra work. We drafted five potential IT-based workflow changes and made, together with the hospital partners, a cost-benefit analysis which solution would be most interesting. As a result, a concept for an open multi center hospital admission portal was drafted, which, in theory, should influence 8 of the 22 problems found. Specifically, the prototype of the portal was designed for a direct triangular interaction between the referring doctor, the patient and the hospital staff.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2016
In an ageing society technical systems that support the residents at home are becoming increasing... more In an ageing society technical systems that support the residents at home are becoming increasingly important. Many of the technologies available today focus on detecting falls or monitoring the health of residents. There are a few projects that focus the « smart home for the elderly » and offer support for the daily activities. The Institute of Medical Informatics of the Bern University of Applied Sciences has developed a prototype of an intelligent wardrobe. Based on sensor data from the apartment like inside temperature, weather forecast and todays events suggestions for appropriate clothes are generated and shown on a display. To facilitate the search, the garments are marked in the closet with colored LEDs.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2020
Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies allow improved understanding of pathogens. In the u... more Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies allow improved understanding of pathogens. In the upstream processing of generating genomic data, there is still a lack of process-oriented tools for managing corresponding meta data. In this paper, we provide a description of how a process-oriented software prototype was developed that allowed the capture and collation of metadata involved when doing NGS. Our question was: How to develop an interactive web application that supports the process-oriented management of genetic data independent of any sequencing technique?
Objective: To identify and summarize the requirements of an optimized CPOE application for pediat... more Objective: To identify and summarize the requirements of an optimized CPOE application for pediatric intensive care. Methods: We analyzed the medication process and its documentation in the pediatric and neonatal intensive care units (PICU/NICU) of two university hospitals using workflow analysis techniques, with the aim of implementing computer-supported physician order entry (CPOE). Results: In both PICU/NICU, we identified similar processes that differed considerably from adult medication routine. For example, both PICU/NICU prepare IV pump syringes on the ward, but receive individualized ready-to-use mixed IV bags for each patient from the hospital pharmacy on the basis of a daily order. For drug dose calculation, both PICU/NICU employ electronic calculation tools that are either incorporated within the CPOE system, or are external modules invoked via interface. On the basis of this analysis, we provide suggestions to optimize CPOE applications for use in the pediatric and neonatal intensive care unit in the form of three catalogues of desiderata for drug order entry support.
German Medical Data Sciences: Bringing Data to Life, 2021
Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) enables a function-preserving surgical strateg... more Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) enables a function-preserving surgical strategy for surgeries of brain or spinal cord pathologies by neurophysiological measurements. However, the IOM data management at neurosurgical institutions are often either not digitized or inefficient in terms of collecting, storing and processing of IOM data. Here, we describe the development of a web application, called IOM-Manager, as a first step towards the complete digitization of the IOM workflow. The web application is used for structured protocoling based on standardized protocol entry catalog, data archiving, and data analysis. These functionalities are based on the results of the requirement engineering of a process analysis, a survey with potential users and a market analysis. A usability test with one IOM team indicated the IOM-Manager and its other components can in fact solve many problems of existing solutions.
The Arden Syntax for Medical Logic Systems is a standard for encoding and sharing medical knowled... more The Arden Syntax for Medical Logic Systems is a standard for encoding and sharing medical knowledge in the form of Medical Logic Modules. To improve accessibility for clinicians, the originators of the standard deliberately designed Arden Syntax expressions to resemble natural language, and parentheses around operands are not generally required. For certain patterns of nested expressions, however, the use of parentheses is mandatory, otherwise they are not accepted by an Arden Syntax environment. In this study, we refer to such patterns as anomalies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent and the circumstances of such anomalies, and to outline a solution based on an alternative grammar encoding approach. To analyze the distribution of anomalies in nested expressions, we developed two custom-made complementary utilities. The first utility, termed parser, checks a single expression pattern against the specification-compliant grammar for syntactic correctness. The secon...
Mobile apps indicate a positive effect on suicidal ideation and potential impact on suicide attem... more Mobile apps indicate a positive effect on suicidal ideation and potential impact on suicide attempts. As part of the SERO suicide prevention program, Lucerne Psychiatry in collaboration with partner organizations aims to reduce suicides and suicide attempts in its service area, and to improve the self-management of suicidal individuals with a mobile app. The concept for such an app was developed in a trialog with health professionals, persons at risk and their relatives and its functions were compared to six known essential app-based strategies for suicide prevention, such as the development of a safety plan, access to support networks and tracking of mood. We present the concept and architecture for the app and discuss potential added value, which may result from the intertwining of the strategies within the app, which will be available in its first version in late 2022.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2020
Modern clinical laboratories have to confirm that the procedures used for specific tests are reli... more Modern clinical laboratories have to confirm that the procedures used for specific tests are reliable and valid. There are several sources of errors and interferences that can invalidate the results. Medical validation refers to the plausibility check of the test results. Implausible results indicate that something might went wrong with a sample retrieved from the patient, e.g., the blood sample got contaminated with another fluid, which requires re-examination. Here, we describe how an integrated R-based business intelligence (BI) tool can be developed that increase the efficiency of the medical validation at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry (ICC) of the University Hospital Zurich. A BI software environment allowed us to digitalize steps in the validation process that were manually done in Excel worksheets, e.g., importing the data, calculating percentiles, and producing graphical outputs.
Was waren die Neuigkeiten dieses Jahr? Die Eröffnungssitzung um 13.30 Uhr am Dienstag zeigte zunä... more Was waren die Neuigkeiten dieses Jahr? Die Eröffnungssitzung um 13.30 Uhr am Dienstag zeigte zunächst einen jungen, dynamischen neuen deutschen Gesundheitsminister Jens Spahn, der versprach, dass er das Thema eHealth voranbringen und vieles, was bereits vor Jahren bei der Einführungsplanung der elektronischen Gesundheitskarte angedacht war, nun auch wirklich Realität werden lassen möchte. Weitere Höhepunkte folgten.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2011
In an ongoing effort to share heterogeneous electronic medical record (EMR) data in an i2b2 insta... more In an ongoing effort to share heterogeneous electronic medical record (EMR) data in an i2b2 instance between the University Hospitals Münster and Erlangen for joint cancer research projects, an ontology based system for the mapping of EMR data to a set of common data elements has been developed. The system translates the mappings into local SQL scripts, which are then used to extract, transform and load the facts data from each EMR into the i2b2 database. By using Semantic Web standards, it is the authors' goal to reuse the laboriously compiled "mapping knowledge" in future projects, such as a comprehensive cancer ontology or even a hospital-wide clinical ontology.
Summary Background: Information technology in health care has a clear potential to improve the qu... more Summary Background: Information technology in health care has a clear potential to improve the quality and efficiency of health care, especially in the area of medication processes. On the other hand, existing studies show possible adverse effects on patient safety when IT for medication-related processes is developed, introduced or used inappropriately. Objectives: To summarize definitions and observations on IT usage in pharmacotherapy and to derive recommendations and future research priorities for decision makers and domain experts. Methods: This memorandum was developed in a consensus-based iterative process that included workshops and e-mail discussions among 21 experts coordinated by the Drug Information Systems Working Group of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). Results: The recommendations address, among other things, a stepwise and comprehensive strategy for IT usage in medication processes, the integration of contextual informati...
Implementation of a digital data management tool for intraoperative neuromonitoring
Objective: During intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM), data are captured together ... more Objective: During intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM), data are captured together with clinical events. Classically, IOM is documented paper based. This leads to redundant data, which increases the susceptibility to errors and makes it difficult to query the data. The goal of this project[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL]
In this paper, we examine requirements, show potential user interfaces and describe a prototypica... more In this paper, we examine requirements, show potential user interfaces and describe a prototypical development for a Pathway Navigator App that guides the patient through healthcare episodes. Our use case is a fictional patient requiring surgery for a hip total endoprosthesis. Fundamental is the provision of appointment information and the option to contact the healthcare provider for rescheduling. This implied an architecture which was more complicated than expected. We realized an HL7 interface for appointment data from hospital information systems; no comparable standard was found for GP IT systems. The future Swiss Electronic Patient Dossier could enhance the integration of the Path App within a broader health-IT ecosystem.
Systematische Erkennung von unerwünschten Arzneimittelereignissen im Zusammenhang mit potentiell inadäquater Medikation für ältere Patienten in der Notaufnahme
Hintergrund: In steigender Zahl konsultieren ältere Patienten mit multiplen gesundheitlichen Prob... more Hintergrund: In steigender Zahl konsultieren ältere Patienten mit multiplen gesundheitlichen Problemen und einer Vielzahl von Medikamenten die Notaufnahme. Unerwünschte Arzneimittelereignisse (UAE) stellen dabei einen häufigen, jedoch oft unerkannten Faktor dar, der zur Krankenhausauf[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL]
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, Jul 11, 2023
Introduction Research into current robot middleware has revealed that most of them are either too... more Introduction Research into current robot middleware has revealed that most of them are either too complicated or outdated. These facts have motivated the development of a new middleware to meet the requirements of usability by non-experts. The proposed middleware is based on Android and is intended to be placed over existing robot SDKs and middleware. It runs on the android tablet of the Cruzr robot. Various toolings have been developed, such as a web component to control the robot via a webinterface, which facilitates its use. The middleware was developed using Android Java and runs on the Cruzr tablet as an app. It features a WebSocket server that interfaces with the robot and allows control via Python or other WebSocket-compatible languages. The speech interface utilizes Google Cloud Voice text-to-speech and speech-to-text services. The interface was implemented in Python, allowing for easy integration with existing robotics development workflows, and a web interface was developed for direct control of the robot via the web. The new robot middleware was created and deployed on a Cruzr robot, relying on the WebSocket API and featuring a Python implementation. It supports various robot functions, such as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, navigation, displaying content and scanning bar codes. The system's architecture allows for porting the interface to other robots and platforms, showcasing its adaptability. It has been demonstrated that the middleware can be run on a Pepper robot, although not all functions have been implemented yet. The middleware was utilized to implement healthcare use cases and received good feedback. Cloud and local speech services were discussed in regard to the middleware's needs, to run without having to change any code on other robots. An outlook on how the programming interface can further be simplified by using natural text to code generators has been/is given. For other researchers using the aforementioned platforms (Cruzr, Pepper), the new middleware can be utilized for testing human-robot interaction. It can be used in a teaching setting, as well as be adapted to other robots using the same interface and philosophy regarding simple methods.
Background: Currently, it is hard for non-robotics-experts to create healthcare use cases for rob... more Background: Currently, it is hard for non-robotics-experts to create healthcare use cases for robots. To improve this situation, we want to implement our own middleware. This middleware should hide the technical details from our students. With this it will be possible to create social robotic use cases without robotics domain knowledge. The new middleware should cover the existing requirements of being usable by non-experts. Existing robot middleware were researched, and we found that most are too complicated or outdated. This is the reason a new middleware was developed. We developed our new middleware based on Android. The middleware can be put over existing robot SDKs and middleware. It runs on the android tablet of the Cruzr robot. Some tooling for the middleware was developed as well, e.g. a web component to control the robot via a webinterface.Results: We created the new robot middleware and deployed it on a Cruzr robot. The middleware relies on the WebSocket API and includes ...
Although robots have been used for quite some time in education on school and university level, w... more Although robots have been used for quite some time in education on school and university level, we found no reports of robots being used in the teaching of medical informatics. Thus we present the timetable and structure of a one week, 2 ECTS blocked course for robots in medical informatics initiated in autumn 2022. 19 participants completed the first iteration. We report about the requirements in terms of an appropriate programming environment, the combination among robots and our medical informatics lab and the results of the student’s evaluation of the first instance as well as the experiences with the two types of robots used.
In this paper we present first findings of the Digi-Care project, a multidisciplinary, multi-stak... more In this paper we present first findings of the Digi-Care project, a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder research project investigating the impacts of digitization on nursing work practices and in particular the transmission of patient care information within and beyond nursing work practices. We completed the initial data collection of the funded 3-year research project and report on a plethora of significant and critical IT-related events. Some of them can be attributed to usability issues.
Clinical pathways are often promoted as the holy grail of efficient healthcare provision. However... more Clinical pathways are often promoted as the holy grail of efficient healthcare provision. However, our experiences during the Swiss research project Hospital of the Future demonstrated that most Swiss hospitals do not implement clinical pathways in the sense of '… a document describing the common process of a multidisciplinary treatment for a particular type of patient'. In this paper, we will discuss reasons for the lack of pathway implementations. We differentiate between three different categories of explanations: (i) organization-specific impediments, (ii) environmental hurdles, and (iii) inherent problems of clinical pathways. Without additional support and regulation by the policy maker, it seems rather unlikely that an increase of pathway implementations will take place in the near-future in Switzerland.
We analyzed the admission workflow in three Swiss hospitals of different size for normal and emer... more We analyzed the admission workflow in three Swiss hospitals of different size for normal and emergency admissions. Our goal was to detect shortcomings mainly in the administrative admission process due to media breaks. We obtained 9 different workflows (three per hospital) and a total of 22 shortcomings in the admission process which were present or likely in two or more of the hospitals. A considerable number could be traced back to missing information requiring time consuming extra work. We drafted five potential IT-based workflow changes and made, together with the hospital partners, a cost-benefit analysis which solution would be most interesting. As a result, a concept for an open multi center hospital admission portal was drafted, which, in theory, should influence 8 of the 22 problems found. Specifically, the prototype of the portal was designed for a direct triangular interaction between the referring doctor, the patient and the hospital staff.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2016
In an ageing society technical systems that support the residents at home are becoming increasing... more In an ageing society technical systems that support the residents at home are becoming increasingly important. Many of the technologies available today focus on detecting falls or monitoring the health of residents. There are a few projects that focus the « smart home for the elderly » and offer support for the daily activities. The Institute of Medical Informatics of the Bern University of Applied Sciences has developed a prototype of an intelligent wardrobe. Based on sensor data from the apartment like inside temperature, weather forecast and todays events suggestions for appropriate clothes are generated and shown on a display. To facilitate the search, the garments are marked in the closet with colored LEDs.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2020
Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies allow improved understanding of pathogens. In the u... more Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies allow improved understanding of pathogens. In the upstream processing of generating genomic data, there is still a lack of process-oriented tools for managing corresponding meta data. In this paper, we provide a description of how a process-oriented software prototype was developed that allowed the capture and collation of metadata involved when doing NGS. Our question was: How to develop an interactive web application that supports the process-oriented management of genetic data independent of any sequencing technique?
Objective: To identify and summarize the requirements of an optimized CPOE application for pediat... more Objective: To identify and summarize the requirements of an optimized CPOE application for pediatric intensive care. Methods: We analyzed the medication process and its documentation in the pediatric and neonatal intensive care units (PICU/NICU) of two university hospitals using workflow analysis techniques, with the aim of implementing computer-supported physician order entry (CPOE). Results: In both PICU/NICU, we identified similar processes that differed considerably from adult medication routine. For example, both PICU/NICU prepare IV pump syringes on the ward, but receive individualized ready-to-use mixed IV bags for each patient from the hospital pharmacy on the basis of a daily order. For drug dose calculation, both PICU/NICU employ electronic calculation tools that are either incorporated within the CPOE system, or are external modules invoked via interface. On the basis of this analysis, we provide suggestions to optimize CPOE applications for use in the pediatric and neonatal intensive care unit in the form of three catalogues of desiderata for drug order entry support.
German Medical Data Sciences: Bringing Data to Life, 2021
Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) enables a function-preserving surgical strateg... more Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) enables a function-preserving surgical strategy for surgeries of brain or spinal cord pathologies by neurophysiological measurements. However, the IOM data management at neurosurgical institutions are often either not digitized or inefficient in terms of collecting, storing and processing of IOM data. Here, we describe the development of a web application, called IOM-Manager, as a first step towards the complete digitization of the IOM workflow. The web application is used for structured protocoling based on standardized protocol entry catalog, data archiving, and data analysis. These functionalities are based on the results of the requirement engineering of a process analysis, a survey with potential users and a market analysis. A usability test with one IOM team indicated the IOM-Manager and its other components can in fact solve many problems of existing solutions.
The Arden Syntax for Medical Logic Systems is a standard for encoding and sharing medical knowled... more The Arden Syntax for Medical Logic Systems is a standard for encoding and sharing medical knowledge in the form of Medical Logic Modules. To improve accessibility for clinicians, the originators of the standard deliberately designed Arden Syntax expressions to resemble natural language, and parentheses around operands are not generally required. For certain patterns of nested expressions, however, the use of parentheses is mandatory, otherwise they are not accepted by an Arden Syntax environment. In this study, we refer to such patterns as anomalies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent and the circumstances of such anomalies, and to outline a solution based on an alternative grammar encoding approach. To analyze the distribution of anomalies in nested expressions, we developed two custom-made complementary utilities. The first utility, termed parser, checks a single expression pattern against the specification-compliant grammar for syntactic correctness. The secon...
Mobile apps indicate a positive effect on suicidal ideation and potential impact on suicide attem... more Mobile apps indicate a positive effect on suicidal ideation and potential impact on suicide attempts. As part of the SERO suicide prevention program, Lucerne Psychiatry in collaboration with partner organizations aims to reduce suicides and suicide attempts in its service area, and to improve the self-management of suicidal individuals with a mobile app. The concept for such an app was developed in a trialog with health professionals, persons at risk and their relatives and its functions were compared to six known essential app-based strategies for suicide prevention, such as the development of a safety plan, access to support networks and tracking of mood. We present the concept and architecture for the app and discuss potential added value, which may result from the intertwining of the strategies within the app, which will be available in its first version in late 2022.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2020
Modern clinical laboratories have to confirm that the procedures used for specific tests are reli... more Modern clinical laboratories have to confirm that the procedures used for specific tests are reliable and valid. There are several sources of errors and interferences that can invalidate the results. Medical validation refers to the plausibility check of the test results. Implausible results indicate that something might went wrong with a sample retrieved from the patient, e.g., the blood sample got contaminated with another fluid, which requires re-examination. Here, we describe how an integrated R-based business intelligence (BI) tool can be developed that increase the efficiency of the medical validation at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry (ICC) of the University Hospital Zurich. A BI software environment allowed us to digitalize steps in the validation process that were manually done in Excel worksheets, e.g., importing the data, calculating percentiles, and producing graphical outputs.
Was waren die Neuigkeiten dieses Jahr? Die Eröffnungssitzung um 13.30 Uhr am Dienstag zeigte zunä... more Was waren die Neuigkeiten dieses Jahr? Die Eröffnungssitzung um 13.30 Uhr am Dienstag zeigte zunächst einen jungen, dynamischen neuen deutschen Gesundheitsminister Jens Spahn, der versprach, dass er das Thema eHealth voranbringen und vieles, was bereits vor Jahren bei der Einführungsplanung der elektronischen Gesundheitskarte angedacht war, nun auch wirklich Realität werden lassen möchte. Weitere Höhepunkte folgten.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2011
In an ongoing effort to share heterogeneous electronic medical record (EMR) data in an i2b2 insta... more In an ongoing effort to share heterogeneous electronic medical record (EMR) data in an i2b2 instance between the University Hospitals Münster and Erlangen for joint cancer research projects, an ontology based system for the mapping of EMR data to a set of common data elements has been developed. The system translates the mappings into local SQL scripts, which are then used to extract, transform and load the facts data from each EMR into the i2b2 database. By using Semantic Web standards, it is the authors' goal to reuse the laboriously compiled "mapping knowledge" in future projects, such as a comprehensive cancer ontology or even a hospital-wide clinical ontology.
Summary Background: Information technology in health care has a clear potential to improve the qu... more Summary Background: Information technology in health care has a clear potential to improve the quality and efficiency of health care, especially in the area of medication processes. On the other hand, existing studies show possible adverse effects on patient safety when IT for medication-related processes is developed, introduced or used inappropriately. Objectives: To summarize definitions and observations on IT usage in pharmacotherapy and to derive recommendations and future research priorities for decision makers and domain experts. Methods: This memorandum was developed in a consensus-based iterative process that included workshops and e-mail discussions among 21 experts coordinated by the Drug Information Systems Working Group of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). Results: The recommendations address, among other things, a stepwise and comprehensive strategy for IT usage in medication processes, the integration of contextual informati...
Implementation of a digital data management tool for intraoperative neuromonitoring
Objective: During intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM), data are captured together ... more Objective: During intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM), data are captured together with clinical events. Classically, IOM is documented paper based. This leads to redundant data, which increases the susceptibility to errors and makes it difficult to query the data. The goal of this project[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL]
In this paper, we examine requirements, show potential user interfaces and describe a prototypica... more In this paper, we examine requirements, show potential user interfaces and describe a prototypical development for a Pathway Navigator App that guides the patient through healthcare episodes. Our use case is a fictional patient requiring surgery for a hip total endoprosthesis. Fundamental is the provision of appointment information and the option to contact the healthcare provider for rescheduling. This implied an architecture which was more complicated than expected. We realized an HL7 interface for appointment data from hospital information systems; no comparable standard was found for GP IT systems. The future Swiss Electronic Patient Dossier could enhance the integration of the Path App within a broader health-IT ecosystem.
Systematische Erkennung von unerwünschten Arzneimittelereignissen im Zusammenhang mit potentiell inadäquater Medikation für ältere Patienten in der Notaufnahme
Hintergrund: In steigender Zahl konsultieren ältere Patienten mit multiplen gesundheitlichen Prob... more Hintergrund: In steigender Zahl konsultieren ältere Patienten mit multiplen gesundheitlichen Problemen und einer Vielzahl von Medikamenten die Notaufnahme. Unerwünschte Arzneimittelereignisse (UAE) stellen dabei einen häufigen, jedoch oft unerkannten Faktor dar, der zur Krankenhausauf[for full text, please go to the a.m. URL]
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Papers by Thomas Bürkle